Tag: Horns

(You can see the helmet in its complete stage above, this also happened to be when I was interviewed for CATV a Japanese TV Channel that is broadcast to over 800,000 people, no pressure.. )

The second part of my Samurai Armour instalment,

When constructing the armour I thought long and hard about the helmet as it really is the centrepiece for any samurai armour. There are such vast amounts of styles and variations when it comes to this part of the samurai armour it was actually very difficult to choose. After looking through lots of different resources online and in books provided by Watanabe sensei I found one and based my design roughly around it!

Making the horns

I started off by making a cardboard cutout of one side then using it as a stencil to make both sides identical. After cutting, tweaking and perfecting it I scored the outline on to the same black plastic sheets that were used for the rest of the armour. This would act as the support and backbone really of the horns.

After cutting out the insert I cut out two pieces of styrofoam in the shape of the horns.

Then I worked them with the Stanley knife shaving the sides and rounding off both sides, then I used a fine course sandpaper and smoothed off the edges.

Then same then I taped and glued the two pieces together with the plastic cutout in between.

The next stage was to add cloth over the top of the black tape to allow me to spray them easier. Also, this was a chance to add an effect to the horns so they weren’t perfectly smooth making them more like an animal’s horn.

After many layers of glue (about 7 or 8) I started to smooth out the surface using sand paper then repeating the glueing process to take away the ragged edge of the cloth. After three or four more layers it was ready to have its final dry then paint!

After the paint had dried I attached the two pieces together and fitted them to my helmet. The final result looks pretty awesome I think anyway! Let me know what you think!

(This is an older photo there has been more modifications made to the armour for example, all the blue thread you see has been changed to purple and the Takeda mon has been added to the hand guards)